By Danny R. Johnson
NEW YORK, NY – On Monday, February 17, 2014, at 11:30 PM EST, from NBC Studio 6B in the GE Building in New York City, Jimmy Fallon began his tenure as the sixth host of NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. After the opening night – the show averaged a 3.8 rating in adults 18-49 and 11.31 million viewers overall in Nielsen’s fast-national estimates. This made it the second biggest audience for The Tonight Show since May 2009, behind Jay Leno’s final farewell two weeks earlier and the transition to Conan O’Brien nearly five years prior.
With Friday’s telecast of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon delivering the show’s highest ratings since Monday’s series premiere, Fallon has generated strong viewer sampling throughout his week of post-Olympic telecasts.
For the full week, Tonight averaged 8.490 million viewers overall, making it the most-watched week of The Tonight Show in 20 years (since the week of the Cheers finale, May 17-21, 1993, 9.080 million), despite four of this week’s five telecasts being moved to midnight ET start times due to Olympic overruns.
For NBC the decision to bring on Jimmy Fallon to succeed Leno was nothing but common sense. The cash-register-drawer-jawed new host not only projects a likable, intimate video/Internet presence, but he will also bring in more money for Tonight: his audience tends to be younger than Johnny Carson’s and Leno, thus more appealing to advertisers. Fallon, recipient of a 2013 GRAMMY® Award for Best Comedy Album, Blow Your Pants Off, is also one heck of a stand-up comedy guy who can go toe-to-toe with anyone.
Fallon, a former cast member on Saturday Night Live, was appointed the third host of Late Night by executive producer Lorne Michaels in 2009. The incorporation of the Internet unlike other talk shows was decided long before the show began. Between Fallon’s own musical sensibilities and the recruitment of his house band , hip-hop collective The Roots, his incarnation of Late Night evolved into the most deeply musical of TV’s musical-comedy variety programs, with sketches in which he parodies Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen going viral online, proved to be a successful marketing tool for NBC and Comcast Universal.
For The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, he will appear in 200 new episodes a year, considerable less than the 250 shows a year Leno once did. And no slot is planned for a substitute host. Fallon will be the dominate host – period.
The 39 year-old Fallon, a Brooklyn, NY native who is married to Nancy Juvonen, sees his anointing as a reward to be judiciously savored. “I consider myself a good soldier,” he says. “You go to work, you do the job–write joke, tell joke, do comedy skits, get check–and the world will pretty much take care of itself.” After establishing himself as a Johnny wannabe, the smart and hipped comic was offered other talk-show slots, but, he says, “I wisely turned them down. To me, NBC was the only network to do comedy on television. I’m kind of coming in as the new Jr. CEO. You don’t really own it; you just hold it and try not to drop the ball. I like the history of The Tonight Show, being able to look back over the years and think, gee! Steve Allen! Jack Paar! Johnny Carson! Jay Leno! You get to walk in the footsteps of the great ones.”
Indeed, Steve Allen built the wall in 1954, establishing Tonight as a bedtime slot for zany comedy and snappy conversation. For five years beginning in 1957, Paar turned it into a wailing wall; he made Tonight into Event TV by tangling with politicians and crackpots, discussing his young daughter’s training bra, walking off the show one night after the censors clipped a joke. And Carson, unquestionably the longest lived power player in TV, bought the wall. Or rather, as his popularity and contract demands escalated, NBC bought it for him.
With his sangfroid and Swiss-watch timing, Carson brought a temperate temperature to Tonight after the Paar boil. But he did more: in his nightly monologue he helped set the nation’s political and social agenda. When Johnny made jokes about Vietnam, Watergate, errant Senators and presidents, or TV evangelists, he enabled the audience to laugh the problem away. “Nobody could figure out Johnny’s politics,” Leno once said. “The joke comes first.” The trouble is that Carson’s monologues have stayed hip, while his studio audiences grew duller, less attuned to the issues he made fun of.
Leno initially aired from May 25, 1992 to May 29, 2009, and resumed production on March 1, 2010 until its ending on February 6, 2014. The fourth incarnation of the Tonight Show franchise made its debut on May 25, 1992, three days following Johnny Carson’s retirement as host of the program. The program originated from NBC Studios in Burbank, California , and was broadcast Monday through Friday at 11:35 PM in the Eastern and Pacific time zones (10:35 PM Central / Mountain time). Unlike Carson or his predecessor Jack Paar, Leno only once utilized a guest host, preferring to host the series by himself.
Actor Will Smith was THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON first celebrity guest when he debut on NBC on February 17. (Photo Courtesy of NBC/Comcast Universal)
In October 2010, David Letterman beat Leno’s program in the ratings, for the first time since Leno returned to hosting The Tonight Show. By May 2011, Leno’s Tonight Show regained the lead and has held it since then. However, by August 2012, The Los Angeles Times was reporting that The Tonight Show was in serious trouble for a number of reasons, most notably that NBC has been losing money. While Leno offered to take a pay cut, at least 24 members of his staff were laid off. By March 2013, there were rumors that NBC would have Jimmy Fallon, who has been hosting Late Night since 2009 when he succeeded O’Brien, become the next host of The Tonight Show when Leno’s current contract ends in 2014 and NBC would move the show back to New York for the first time in over 40 years. On May 13, 2013, during its fall “upfronts” presentation, NBC officially confirmed that Fallon will take over as host of the Tonight Show beginning on Feb. 24, 2014; Seth Meyers, another Saturday Night Live alumnus in turn, will take over Fallon’s time slot.
Leno’s final Tonight Show aired on February 6, 2014. Per the terms on his deal with NBC, his staff will be paid through September 2014. Leno wrapped up the night before the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which began on February 7. Jimmy Fallon took over the Tonight Show on February 17.
Now that the changing of the guard is complete. “I’ll continue to do a monologue about the topics of the day,” Fallon stated. “I enjoy doing the political stuff”– though his old stance of ironically outraged liberalism has been tempered as he segued from guest to host. Fallon has retained his sidekick and announcer Steve Higgins, as well as house band The Roots, with bandleader Questlove.
It will be interesting to see over the months to follow how Fallon evolves behind the desk. You hope that he can figure out how to conduct an interview without having to break into the guest’s response. I suspect we will see Fallon replacing the interviews with viral-ready clips: More dance numbers, skits and musical bait from guest musicians.
But it could be that Fallon would prefer altogether not to do anything too bold with the format; that he sees himself as a proud guardian, both of The Tonight Show‘s times gone by and of a relaxed and casual place where actor Will Smith can feel at ease without having to answer hard questions like “Why aren’t you starring in the new Independence Day movie redub?
Jimmy Fallon’s tenure at the helm of the Tonight Show will be closely watched by advertisers, NBC/Comcast executives, and the general public. For now Fallon did get it right in his opening monologue when he said: “Hi folks … I am your host for now.” Only time will tell if his tenure is temporary or permanent. In the meantime – Good Night Jimmy and Good Luck.
Danny R. Johnson is San Diego County News’ Entertainment News Editor.
